My hardcore weekend

by ysoldateagueMay 20, 2007

Oh yeah! This weekend I managed to grate my fingertip while making dinner for a couple of friends on Friday night. Then I woke up on Saturday morning with a mysterious burst blister on my finger. I stuck a plaster (as in a band-aid) on it and forgot about it while I cleaned up and did some pattern writing (yes really there are patterns coming). It wasn’t until today that I was sitting knitting my stockings that I realised how I got the blister:

Clearly cooking and knitting are too dangerous for me, but that probably doesn’t leave me many safer hobbies.

At least while taking the glass out of all of these picture frames so I could paint them I was being careful.

Hope you had a good weekend too, even if it wasn’t as hardcore as mine!

p.s. See what I wrote about pattern writing above? Well that was Snow White, and I need to check the row counts against a measurement chart (because I am short and short waisted so probably not average) but it’s basically done. It was months and months ago that I asked for test knitters and anyone looking for the pattern was probably under the impression that it was busily being knitted up. Unfortunately no. But tomorrow I’m going to send out an email with all of the details to everyone who volunteered. If you’re actually really eager you might want to keep an eye out, because whoever replies first and can meet my requirements will get to do it.

p.s. 2 (this is how not to write a blog post isn’t it?):

Seeing as I got an email from Dee while typing this and she is the gazillionth person to tag me with one of the x random / weird things meme I thought I may as well try and come up with something:

1. Well my name is pretty weird, and the spelling is even weirder. It’s a variation of the name of a character from the Arthurian legends, from the Tristan and Isolde / Iseult story. It’s pronounced is-all-da, but people only very rarely get it right. Mostly I’m known as Iz.
2. I’ve been living on my own for the last six months or so, and it’s honestly the least lonely I’ve ever felt.
3. I have a pretty random diet. I’ve never, ever eaten meat, except for fish. For the last year or so, on the advice of my naturopath Jan DeVries I haven’t been eating dairy either.
4. I’ve spoken at conferences to hundreds of people and that’s easier as far as I’m concerned than talking with a small group. I wonder if there’s a connection between this and blogging?

5. A few years ago I was chairman (chairman just because I was good at yelling at people at meetings so that we could get stuff done) of a group of young people who organised anti-war demonstrations among other things. The group didn’t last very long for a variety of reasons, but I am so, so proud of what we did. The day before Iraq was invaded we had about 5000 high school students from all over the city converge on the city centre.

6. That summer I was involved in making a film about our experiences, it’s won multiple awards and toured festivals all over the world. It was shown at a film festival for young people in Greece that I was able to attend, and spent a week watching several films a day that I would never have had a chance to see normally. I couldn’t find the whole film online, but a ten minute edit can be downloaded from this site. It’s called Old Enough To Know Better and the link is about halfway down. If you watch it I guess you’ll get to find out what I sound like, and how I looked when I was seventeen. Incidentally my accent is often considered to be a random thing. A couple of years later, when the G8 circus descended we made a second film, although I wasn’t quite so involved in the making of that one.

7. I find small things (in any medium) much easier to make, even something tiny and detailed is much easier for me than something larger and much simpler.

8. I started off studying English Literature and Film Studies at the University of Aberdeen, because they let me skip first year and I wanted to write and make films. I transferred to Edinburgh after deciding I couldn’t spend more time in that place and re-did second year, dropping the film because they didn’t do it. It’s been a long time since I did any real writing or film making though. In some ways my life is both exactly like and a million miles away from how I pictured it a few years ago. I suppose that this is a kind of writing.
Ok well apparently I had more to write for that than I was expecting too. Way too lazy to tag anyone, but feel free to write your own list.

Pricing patterns has always been one of the hardest parts of designing and I’ve often felt like the “standard” price of knitting patterns is both lower than other similar products (eg. indie sewing patterns) and doesn’t really reflect the amount of work that goes into them. At the same time, it’s totally fair to worry that rising pattern prices will price people out.